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Auckland University ofTechnology's Pacific Media Centre marked its tenth anniversary with a wide-ranging public seminar discussing two of the region's most critical media freedom crises. The 'Journalism Under Duress in Asia-Pacific' seminar in November 2017 examined media freedom and human rights in the Philippines and in Indonesia's Papua region, generally known as West Papua. The introduction to the PMC seminar, later presented at a Reporters Without Borders (RSF) summit for Asia-Pacific freedom advocates and activist journalists in Paris in July 2018 examined the culture of impunity over crimes against journalists and journalism safety as a major factor undermining media freedom in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss the journal's theme of violence against the press, commenting on articles in the issue on topics including freedom of expression, censorship, and human rights.

This study assesses the scope and applicability of the “protest paradigm” in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The Indian media emerge as the least likely to follow the protest paradigm, while Brazilian and Chinese media conform to it in moderate levels. Comparative analysis suggests the historical legitimacy of informal power negotiations in a political culture makes news media more willing to take protesters seriously and limits adherence to the protest paradigm. In contrast, a news organization’s ideological affiliation with the government of the day, rather than any ideology per se, makes it relatively more likely to conform to the protest paradigm. Marginalization devices such as circus, appearance, and eyewitness accounts are rarely used in any of these nations. But disparity of sources, (non)reference to protesters’ causes and violence, and violence blame appear to be abiding features of news coverage of protests everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the representation of gender violence in the local press in Spain, where one thousand women have been killed in the last fifteen years. The fieldwork allows us to conclude that, even though the printed press has played a key role in raising awareness of the general public and in situating the political debate, a serious improvement is necessary in a coverage that is still unsatisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s administration, the military was called on to confront organized crime, and dozens of journalists were killed in Mexico. Attacks on journalists have continued under the new administration. This study focuses on the erosion of the democratic institution of the press in Mexico’s northern states, for the majority of journalists murdered in the last decade worked in that region. Utilizing Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences model, this study examines pressures constraining the press working in a tide of violence. The thirty-nine semistructured, in-depth interviews with Mexican journalists, who report in five of the northern states, indicate the strongest influences came from outside newsrooms, where intimidation and unthinkable crimes were committed against the press along the entire border. Individual-level influences, such as lack of conflict-reporting training, safety concerns, and handling the trauma of covering violence, were among the strongest pressures often leading to self-censorship. Organizational-level influences, including newsroom policies and financial arrangements with government and business, also influenced journalistic practice. The study added an inter-media level for analyses of news organizations and individual journalists working together to increase safety. Additional findings show major disruptions in border reporting where news “blackouts” exist amid pockets of lawlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses depictions of Chilean folk singer, theater director, and communist Victor Jara in the press of the Soviet Union between 1973 and 1992. Topics discussed include the concept of homo sacer, which is when a person has been outlawed or killed by the state and is then presented as a martyr, the relationship in the Soviet Union between the state and the citizen, and the use of violence by state's such as the Soviet Union.

Proving that terrorism should be seen as a media event (as defined by Dayan and Katz) after 9/11 and treated accordingly. We have turned to the work of Dayan and Katz and George Gerbner's for a definition of media events and of violence in the mass media. This paper is a hermeneutical interpretation of the concept of terrorism and its relation to communication. We have put forward a better understanding of the complex concept of terrorism and its definitions in the mass media context. Terrorism nowadays should always be defined within its inherent relation with the media. The article is the first to define terrorism as media evenit in Dayan and Katz's terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces that the article "Informally Governing Information: How Criminal Rivalry leads to Violence against the Press in Mexico” by Bradley E. Holland and Viridiana Rios has been chosen as the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Peace Science Society Will H. Moore III Prize.